Winter Slabs on Milford Lake

   It was one of those Kansas Winter kind of mornings, very cold with icicles hanging off the docks and a brisk north wind hitting my face as I put the ole tub into Milford Lake yesterday.  Darin and his buddy Dave were super excited and looking to tear into some Crappies, so after managing to make our way down the frost covered boat dock without showing off our best moonwalks and freestyle dance moves we threw on our lifejackets and got ready for a day of swinging Slabs over the side of the boat. 
  After a short, chilly ride out of Milford State Park we started scanning some of the steep, deep banks on the main lake where I have some brush piles put out and we were somewhat protected from the wind.
  

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   When scanning ledges in Winter I will run a zig zag pattern over them until I determine what depth the fish seem to be holding in. In that area it seemed to be deep so we focused on depths between eighteen and twenty five feet deep. After no time at all we found a pile of brush that was crawling with fish more so than the others right on the deep side of the drop off and after taking a few mins to explain the in's & out's of how the Garmin Livescope works, I put the parking brake on the Ranger by hitting the spot lock button on my Minn Kota and they started filling up the fishbox almost right away.

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 We were using the same ole routine I always run in the Winter, shad colors and big profile jigs on heavy heads. Z-Man Fishing Products takes care of both for me. We were running TRD TicklerZ and Trick ShotZ on 3/16th Finesse Eyes and the 1/5th NedLockZ jigheads. When the fish are stacked up that tight it's nice to be able to run through a hundred plus fish and not have to worry about changing jigs or wearing out your plastics. That is a huge advantage you will gain fishing with the Elaztec line of baits.
   
​  We fished several areas and checked a few coves but the coves seemed to have more smaller fish mixed in so we ran back out on the main lake to stay on the better fish. Although we were vertical jigging brush piles, there was several nice sized schools of Crappie suspended twelve to eighteen feet down over open water on the deep side of the main lake drop offs that would have been perfect targets for casting jigs or even spider rigging. The water temp was 36.4 degrees with a N.W wind at twelve and clear skies. ​Although we focused on water depths between eighteen and twenty five feet deep,  we found fish stacked as deep as thirty four feet and as shallow as eleven feet of water. 
    

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